


Frame (the Music Box Winds Down Remix)

by feralphoenix



Category: Yggdra Union
Genre: M/M, Memento mori
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-27
Updated: 2013-10-27
Packaged: 2017-12-30 15:13:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,132
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1020202
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/feralphoenix/pseuds/feralphoenix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If there’s any one major change—it’s that every now and again he’ll stay in bed in the morning instead of rising with the gods-blest sun.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Frame (the Music Box Winds Down Remix)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [intaglionyx](https://archiveofourown.org/users/intaglionyx/gifts).
  * Inspired by [Frame](https://archiveofourown.org/works/774220) by [intaglionyx](https://archiveofourown.org/users/intaglionyx/pseuds/intaglionyx). 



> _(No more dreaming of the dead_ – memento mori)

He doesn’t understand the term _stasis._ You struggle to explain it to him in a way that will be easier to get, but he just keeps staring at you blankly. You take his hands in yours, examine the creases that line his knuckles to avoid looking at the heavy manacle scars along your wrists.

“My people don’t get old,” you say at last. “We aren’t immortal, we—don’t get to a certain age and then stop, the way that other angels do. We aren’t _allowed_ to get old. They freeze us as soon as they don’t need us anymore because our lifespans are theorized to be comparatively short. I don’t—I have no idea if I’ll live as long as a human would. Chances are I’ll give out decades before you.”

Gulcasa doesn’t say anything: He looks at you with intense eyes, his brow furrowed, and after a while he squeezes your hands.

 

 

The first few years you were seized with an awful fear of time’s passage. You have been alive for some thousand years, give or take a century or two; you are free, which means you have mere decades left, and every moment of freedom is precious.

But the real shock comes in your mid-twenties. This is when your hands become arthritic, your joints worn down painfully by too much delicate work. Your circulation is poor; the hollow between the bone of your thumbs and pointer fingers swell up painfully when you work too hard.

You start to notice it when you don’t bounce back as quickly as you expect yourself to, then. That’s what it takes for you to realize that you’ve taken your youth for granted, all this time. You transmigrated from body to body like seasons turning, and anyway you were cursed with immortality by those who were forbidden to destroy you outright. When your cells had replicated, they did so perfectly, telomeres frozen at one length like some sort of perfected perpetual motion machine. But you have come unstuck in time, now; you’re dying slowly second by second.

You push yourself through the unwelcome surprises with the knowledge that you’re going to have to take better care of yourself, anyway, because this life is the only one you have now.

 

 

You wonder if Gulcasa feels the weight of the years yet.

The choir of concerned allies telling him not to overdo has certainly increased its volume and fervor now he’s creeping up on thirty, but wild horses could not convince Gulcasa not to run his health into the ground when he’s feeling stubborn. Sometimes he looks over at you in the middle of the lectures, and you stare back at him, willing him to remember what you’ve told him and that some of the time he actually has a decent amount of common sense.

He isn’t any less active, and he’s still impervious to the kinds of extreme temperatures that lay you out flat. But you think sometimes that you can see the shade of where he’ll have crow’s feet when he’s scowling, and faint creases along his cheeks that may well deepen into wrinkles in the next ten years.

If there’s any one major change—it’s that every now and again he’ll stay in bed in the morning instead of rising with the gods-blest sun. Nine of those mornings out of ten he’ll just wake you up for sex and then lay around dozing until you give up on sleep—the others rib you both about it over meals—and for all that you enjoy the sex, you sometimes wish he wouldn’t. It’s still strenuous, aerobic activity. He’s just more willing to rest afterwards.

When you’re that close, you can see the few strands of white hair mixed into his bangs and at his temples. Their cause could be trauma or stress as easily as age.

“You worry so much,” he says, and kisses the seam of your empty eyelids. “It’s not healthy for you.”

 “Gulcasa, you are the last person who should ever tell anybody that,” you say, and imply with a gesture that he ought to keep his mouth busy with something other than complaints. It makes him laugh.

 

 

Your body, this form you wear to do inconsequential and precious things like sit in on heads of state meetings and make jewelry (this last form you will ever wear) is unraveling. Maybe it isn’t done quite yet, but it only has two or three decades left in it. This needles your vanity a bit, but old age is something you have seen every human go through, and if you’re going to live among them you may as well suffer time’s slings and arrows alongside them.

If you feel like this at nearly thirty, you do not think you have much hope of living past sixty. It’s laughable, in comparison to your centuries of activity. It’s laughable too that you will be the first Grim Angel to die of _old age,_ but thinking too much on that will make you hysterical, and so you don’t.

 

 

Gulcasa holds your hand and gently pulls you out of the fugues you’re still prone to. The skin around his fingers is getting a little loose, but he’s like Baldus; he still has the hardened musculature of his younger years.

If you had survived your revenge, you never planned to keep on living. A thousand years’ warmongering have made you very tired. Now, the changes in your body make you anxious, but you want to stay with Gulcasa longer.

“I don’t want to outlive you,” you say. This is the crux of the thing, in the end. The winter air is cold on your face, but Gulcasa has wrapped his cloak over your shoulder and it’s warm where you’re in contact with him. “I don’t want to leave you behind me to suffer unnecessarily, but then as long as everyone else is here—you would be all right.”

“Thinking about mortality now and then can’t be helped, but it’s not good to dwell on it,” Gulcasa tells you with all pretense of sensibility. “It’ll happen when it happens. And if you do anything drastic when the time comes, I’m going to be really unhappy with you.”

You let your breath out and watch it waft away in the cold.

“Come to bed with me, for now.” He tugs at your shoulder. “There’s not much else I can do when you’re overthinking life and its mysteries. We’re here now. That’s what you ought to focus on.”

You frown at him. “Sex is your answer to _everything_ these days.”

He shrugs, and you hiss at the draft of cold air this causes. “At least it ought to warm you up, though.”

“Your sister is right. You are a dirty old man.”


End file.
